What is the Value of a Virtual Tour?
YourTour platform for Still Hopes Retirement Community
In our past, the team at The Vectre has produced virtual tours and interactive maps on various digital sites (websites and kiosks) for at least 60 senior living communities all over the country. We’ve often thought about virtual tours, videos, and interactive maps as incredible marketing tools. We still believe that today - virtual tours of residences and amenities are MUST-HAVE marketing tools now. In fact, our client website interactive maps (we call them Virtual Visits) easily rank within the top 10 most visited pages on their websites - usually top 5. With one of our communities, the average time spent on the Virtual Visit page was 47% higher than any other highly-visited page on the site from June through October of 2020. During the same period, another client saw an average time on page (critical KPI for engagement) of 3 minutes, 19 seconds, which was equal to the highly-informative Covid community response page we built for them.
However, what senior living communities have needed this year - and will continue to need even as the pandemic hopefully concludes next year - is to turn a virtual tour from a marketing tool on the community website into a critical sales tool. That’s the direction that The Vectre is on with the YourTour platform. And the thing you have to think about now is personalization. Doing a virtual tour, whether it’s on video as a walkthrough or even through a FaceTime tour, where you’re showing the entire community’s amenities is nothing more than a feature dump to your prospect. “We have great dining venues, we have a wellness and fitness center, we have a pool...” Doesn’t nearly every life plan community have all these things?
But when have you made it about them - the prospect? What about their interests and their motivations to move into a community full of enriching amenities that can fulfill them. Storytelling should focus on personalization to help create a relationship of trust and value for exactly what your community provides to that particular prospect. And consider "prospect X" whose motivations and interests may be very different from "prospect Y".
We’re hearing from a number of senior living providers, including our own clients, that have clearly indicated virtual marketing and sales efforts are going to continue. It’s imperative to prepare for it as part of your pandemic recovery strategy. Getting creative and comfortable with virtual relationship building is critical for sales counselors to make advancements in the sales process. Old dogs will need to learn new tricks.
Consider this success story from Stewart Rawson, Director of Sales and Marketing at Still Hopes Retirement Community in Columbia, SC. He’s recently started using YourTour, our new virtual tour sales enablement tool. After receiving a web lead for a couple that clearly understood they needed to investigate senior living, Stewart scheduled a web conference with them. Within a 45-minute Zoom call using YourTour, Stewart was able to showcase the community and highlight their new WellPointe apartment floor plans and virtual tours. He also emphasized amenities, connections to the central part of the campus, the location of the community within Columbia, etc. all from within the YourTour platform. Stewart said within 15 minutes, their mindset shifted from considering a cottage with a long waitlist to a new apartment within WellPointe. The next day, the couple came in with a deposit check, ready to sign an agreement. Stewart said they mentioned to him at the end of the Zoom call that they felt like they had actually been to the campus for a tour! What better way to create interest, focus on storytelling with the prospect in mind, and close the sell - all within 45 minutes!
We clearly don’t think all sales experiences will go quite like Stewart’s example; however, we do believe that the value of YourTour is just beginning to be tapped. And there’s more - way more - to come! Reach out to schedule a demo of the YourTour platform or click here to find a time on our calendar. To learn more, visit the YourTour page here.